Tribute trip ups cause grief

The Age and Sydney Morning Herald have been making mistakes in the tributes pages, causing already grieving relatives further angst.

And finally tonight to another area where checking would come in handy, because even a minor slip can cause maximum grief.

We’re talking about death notices. And Fairfax’s The Age and Sydney Morning Herald getting them wrong.

JANE: The funeral notices and the, or you know, the death notices and all that, they’re all being done overseas. I think it’s the Philippines ...

— 774 ABC Melbourne, Mornings with Jon Faine, 19th May, 2014

Following complaints last month to Jon Faine at 774 ABC Melbourne about the large number of mistakes in death notices in The Age, we decided to check all the tributes in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald for the month of May.

And, what do you know, we picked up 56 obvious errors.

Typos, wrong dates, funeral details incorrect or missing, and names of the deceased or family members wrong or mis-spelt.

Like this one on 10 May for Joan Simpson, where The Age told her friends

John will be sadly missed

— The Age, 10th May, 2014

Or this a week later for Lorelle Annette Hall whom The Age described as:

Loving and devoted husband of David ...

— The Age, 17th May, 2014

Or this from the Sydney Morning Herald on 5th May

where Sheila McMahon is mis-spelt ... S.H.E.L.I.A

For those already struggling with the loss of a loved one, such mistakes can be very distressing.

As could the following failures in basic English.

James Zavier Lynch was described in the Herald as a ‘sparing partner’

We assume it meant ‘sparring’.

And James Sloan was said by the Age to have ‘pased away’

Fairfax’s tributes began to go pear shaped roughly a year ago ... when the media group sacked around 70 copy takers on its local papers and shipped the jobs to Manila to save money

Last June, 2GB’s Ray Hadley told listeners:

RAY HADLEY: A gentleman who operates a funeral parlour in Sydney was talking to me via email of his concerns that when he puts the notices in on behalf of the bereaved families he's dealing with, he's now dealing via the Fairfax newspaper chain with operators in the Philippines who don't quite understand what he's trying to tell them.

— 2GB, Mornings with Ray Hadley, 13th June, 2013

But since then it seems to have got worse.

Not least because last October Fairfax continued its job cuts and sent The Age and Sydney Morning Herald death notices offshore as well.

As The Age’s editor-in-chief, Andrew Holden admitted to the ABC’s Jon Faine

ANDREW HOLDEN: It was difficult, we’re not going to deny that, and there were certainly some awful errors which I’ve been made aware of, over the past couple of months.

— 774 ABC Melbourne, Mornings with Jon Faine, 20th May, 2014

But, Holden told Faine in May, they’ve raised their game and it’s now close to perfect.

ANDREW HOLDEN: ... I’m told last week it was a 99 percent accuracy rate for the funeral notices. So, we’ve certainly take the complaints very, very seriously and we’ve moved as quickly as we can to fix it.

— 774 ABC Melbourne, Mornings with Jon Faine, 20th May, 2014

Well, by our calculations it’s still not good enough.

So we asked Fairfax if anyone actually reads the notices before they go out.

They dodged that question, but told us ads are read back over the phone, and proofs sent to customers for checking.

But when you’re paying around $300 for a death notice you’d think they could get it right.

And according to funeral directors The Age in particular is not.

It’s terrible. It’s been an absolute disgrace and a nightmare.

— Dianne Jones, General Manager, Kingston Funerals, 21st May, 2014

We’ve decreased our notices in The Age about 50 percent ...

It’s rather sad because if I’m doing a funeral for someone who’s been an avid Age reader all of their life, they want that notice in The Age.